Datura suaveolens
on the moon they’d look like this,
droopy and luminous,
butter-colored, fading down
to white, I’m thinking,
swinging my bare feet,
sipping at some moon-hued wine
from the lunar landscape
of Sardegna, just as he
asks me if I know
they’re often called “moon-
flowers.” I did not know that,
but I’m not surprised that
he does, nor that he’s read my
poem-thoughts again.
I do know, though, that
this blowsy flower’s parts are
hallucinogenic
as all get out, something that
Rappaccini would
have been proud to bring
into existence were he
in that business rather
than that of breeding a toxic
daughter, beautiful
but unlovable.
And just then I remember
how we went for a walk
through the park behind Domus
Aurea one day
and I was angry
because he hadn’t listened
(or maybe hadn’t heard)
and we passed the Datura
in full moony bloom
and he pretended
that the blossom was an old-
fashioned telephone and
he was trying and trying
to reach me. I thought:
This is marriage, not
some lunatic delusion
of my or his making;
this is what you do, and I
laughed, and we walked on.
______________________________________________________________
Moira Egan’s poetry collections are Strange Botany/Botanica Arcana (Pequod, 2014); Hot Flash Sonnets (Passager Books, 2013); Spin (Entasis Press, 2010, for whom, with Clarinda Harriss, she also co-edited the anthology Hot Sonnets, 2011); La Seta della Cravatta/The Silk of the Tie (Edizioni l’Obliquo, 2009); Bar Napkin Sonnets (The Ledge, 2009); and Cleave (WWPH, 2004). Her work has won many awards and has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S. and abroad, including Best American Poetry; The Book of Forms; Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics; and Kindled Terraces: American Poets in Greece. With her husband, Damiano Abeni, she has published more than a dozen volumes in translation in Italy, by authors such as Ashbery, Barth, Bender, Ferlinghetti, Hecht, Strand, and others. Their translations of Italian poems into English have been published in many U.S. journals, as well as in the FSG Book of 20th Century Italian Poetry and in Patrizia Cavalli’s My Poems Will Not Change the World (FSG). She holds degrees from Bryn Mawr College, Johns Hopkins University, and Columbia University, where James Merrill chose her graduate manuscript for the David Craig Austin Prize.
Egan has been a Mid Atlantic Arts Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Writer in Residence at St. James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, Malta; a Writing Fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Center; a Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center; and, in 2015, with Damiano Abeni, will be the writer in residence at the James Merrill House. She lives in Rome, and teaches English and Creative Writing.
